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ewhite

macrumors member
Original poster
Jun 30, 2009
38
0
*Just realized I posted this in the Macbook forum - if a Mod can move this to the MacBook Pro forum it would be appreciated.
Hi all,

I’ve hit a Mac issue that has me stumped.

Looking to see anyone here recognizes potential signs of life or known warning signs that say this may be fixable.

I recently received a MacBook Pro from a friend after she upgraded as she thought it was dead. “Boots up to a white screen” she said, and that’s it. The Mac is in overall good condition considering age as an Intel Core Duo 2.0Ghz model (not Core 2 Duo, just Core Duo) from 2006 according to Wikipedia and the serial # on Apple’s support site.

I thought I had it licked when I was able to eject the disc inside (some no-name heavily scratched DVD+R DL disc) and a fresh install of Snow Leopard started to proceed after a normal boot with the Mac logo and everything. However - during the first 2 minutes of the install the system crashes and either reboots automatically to a white screen or before rebooting tells me to “reboot or power down the machine. This is a repeatable issue.

I’ve got what looks to be a new 85W official Mac power supply that came with this Mac and I’ve also tried two different known good hard drives with the same result of crashing on install. The only flag to me is a single 2GB RAM chip (the only chip installed) that has no make/model or vendor on it that looks a suspicious to me. However I don’t have any other compatible RAM to test if this is the issue. Battery is also active, but I have not been able to check health based on these issues.

Thanks for reading, any any thoughts on this appreciated. Hopefully someone has seen this before and has an idea on what I should troubleshoot next.
 
Last edited:

Detrius

macrumors 68000
Sep 10, 2008
1,623
19
Apex, NC
The auto-reboot is strange. That points to the SMC on the logic board. The kernel panic could be anything, though RAM is generally the first thing to test. Download and burn the latest memtest ISO from here. You can boot the machine from the CD. Leave it running for at least a few hours. That'll give you an idea of the state of the RAM. If it fails, move it to the other RAM slow and retest.
 

ewhite

macrumors member
Original poster
Jun 30, 2009
38
0
Thanks for the reply here - I actually found a good deal for a single chip of RAM from a known good major vendor to test this further, otherwise the memtest is a great idea. Did not realize that was an option on a Mac.
 

ewhite

macrumors member
Original poster
Jun 30, 2009
38
0
* Follow-up *

Using a new, known good RAM module from a major Mac certified vendor did the trick! MacBook Pro booted RIGHT UP and was working fine!

Hope this thread helps someone else in the future in a similar situation.
 
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